1. Chemical reactions: beyond thermodynamics, kinetics

A chemical reaction is a process in which chemical substances, called "reactants", are transformed into other substances, called "products". Reactions are described by a chain of elementary mechanisms called :

In this equation (1) , A represents the reactant and C the reaction product. k is the reaction constant, which is the key parameter for calculating the reaction rate when defining concentrations, or the diffusion coefficient in diffusive phenomena. These quantities govern the kinetics of the system under study....